This week the Government announced that schools would remain closed until February 1st, and that Leaving Cert students would be able to attend school for three days a week, beginning on Monday January 11th. That Government decision remained in force for all of twenty-four hours! Because of this continuous disruption and uncertainty, no doubt caused by the Covid-19 upsurge in the community, but not helped by Government indecision, I have brought together here in one post links to a series of relevant notes which you may consider useful in your English course studies for 2021. These notes are not exhaustive but focus mainly on Single Text, Comparative and Poetry Sections.
Caveat Emptor! Leaving Cert Student Beware !! These are resources which you should use wisely. They are personal responses to the various texts and you should read and consider them if you find them useful.
IN OTHER WORDS, MAKE YOUR OWN OF THEM, ADD TO THEM OR DELETE FROM THEM AS YOU SEE FIT. ALSO, YOU MIGHT SPREAD THE WORD, DON’T KEEP THEM ALL TO YOURSELF!
THE SINGLE TEXT AND A SELECTION OF TEXTS PRESCRIBED FOR THE COMPARATIVE STUDY 2021
A FEW OBSERVATIONS ON THE COMPARATIVE STUDY QUESTION IN 2021
MODES OF COMPARISON For each Leaving Certificate course, three modes of comparison will be prescribed. This means that the texts chosen for comparative study must be studied under these particular modes (headings).
This year the modes of comparison at Higher Level and Ordinary Level are as follows:
Higher Level
Theme or Issue
Cultural Context
General Vision and Viewpoint
Ordinary Level
Theme
Social Setting
Relationships
This year there will be two questions on EACH of these modes of comparison. In reality this means that because of the time constraints and limited time given to you to study the syllabus properly you only need to focus on ONE mode of comparison.
FYI the following adjustments have been made to the Comparative Section in the Leaving Cert English Syllabus for 2021: next June the Comparative Section will include questions on all three modes prescribed for examination in 2021 – namely, Theme or Issue, Cultural Context, and General Vision and Viewpoint.
Candidates will be required to answer on one mode only. This will allow you to concentrate your efforts because in effect, if you wish, you can simply concentrate on one mode of comparison only and you can be guaranteed that there will be a choice of two questions for you to answer on that chosen mode of comparison. Remember, the standard required won’t alter but you are being given greater choice this year in your Comparative Study.
The internal question choice within modes will remain the same. Single questions (marked out of 70) will require candidates to refer to AT LEAST TWO texts in their response. The same criteria for assessment will apply to candidates irrespective of whether they refer to two texts or to three texts when responding to 70 mark questions. Two-part questions (marked out of 30 and 40) will require candidates to refer to ONE text in answer to part (a) and to TWO other texts in answer to part (b).
Theme or Issue
This involves comparing texts on a prescribed theme(s). These would have to be themes that were pervasive and central to the texts chosen for study e.g.
Isolation and Loneliness Relationships Family Childhood Fantasy and reality
These themes/issues will be the messages or concerns that the writer or film director wishes to impart to the audience. In most texts, there will be a number of themes/issues worth considering
Your task, therefore, in this section is to compare and contrast the same theme as it is treated by different authors or film directors.
Cultural Context
Compare the texts focusing on social rituals, values and attitudes. This is not to be seen as a sociological study of the texts alone. It means taking some perspectives, which enable the students to understand the kind of values and structures with which people contend. It amounts to entering into the world of the text and getting some insight and feel for the cultural texture of the world created. This would imply considering such aspects as the rituals of life and the routines of living, the structures of society, familial, social, economic, religious and political: the respective roles of men and women in society, the position of children, the role and nature of work, the sources and structures of power and the significance of race and class.
Vision and Viewpoint
The term, general vision and viewpoint, may be understood by candidates to mean the broad outlook of the authors of the texts (or of the texts themselves) as interpreted and understood by the reader – excerpt from Marking Scheme, 2003
When approaching this mode of comparison it is important to examine each text to discover what particular vision or view of life is presented by the novelist, playwright or film director. We need to find the overall view of the writer as it is reflected through the themes and issues raised in the text. We will probably realise that we as readers or as an audience have been given a privileged position by the author and that we often know more than the characters in the novel or the actors on the stage or film set. We are, after all, entitled to our own viewpoint also! Commonly, we are expected to judge whether the text is positive or negative, optimistic or pessimistic, realistic or dystopian, etc., etc.
IN SUMMARY….
When you answer a question in the Comparative Section remember that you have to be selective in emphasising the most meaningful similarities and differences between texts. The more similar they appear to be, the more provocative and challenging it is to contrast them and to draw out differences between them. Remember also that when you draw out surprising or disputable similarities or differences, you require detailed support from the texts.
In a Comparative answer, it is vitally important to compare and contrast these different ways of looking at life, or to examine if there is coherence or a lack of coherence between all these differing viewpoints.
THE POETRY SECTION IN 2021
I include links to SIX of the eight poets on your course here – simply click on the link. Again, in this area, the Department and the Examinations Commission have made very generous adjustments to the Syllabus for 2021. So, this year, ONE additional poetry question will be included i.e. candidates will be required to answer one of five questions instead of the usual four. In reality, therefore, instead of having to have at least FIVE poets prepared for examination, you now will need to have at least FOUR poets studied at Higher Level this year. (Two extra poems will also be included in the Ordinary Level paper).
This poem, “My November Guest”, is taken from A Boy’s Will, the first published volume of Frost’s poetry (1913). This is among the best of Robert Frost’s poems where he speaks of the Fall in rural New Hampshire.
The poet at some point of time must have experienced extreme pain and sorrow in the month of November. There is an air of familiarity created by the poet and he and his guest have walked and talked along the ‘sodden pasture lane’. Sorrow is personified as a woman – a friend, companion, and she is considered a regular visitor and ‘a guest’ in the poem. He is very comfortable in her company and doesn’t wish to be separated from her – ‘She talks and I am fain to list’. She is dressed for the weather – that time of year in New England before the first snows of winter – wearing ‘simple worsted grey’.
As the poem commences, Sorrow is personified as a woman and someone whom the poet dearly loves. In the very first line, “My Sorrow, when she’s here with me,” marks the peak of the poet’s togetherness with sorrow.
My Sorrow, when she’s here with me, Thinks these dark days of autumn rain Are beautiful as days can be;
Walking with the poet, she (Sorrow) speaks of the beautiful Autumn days, finds ecstasy in the withered trees, and the autumnal browns! Fall is a season marked with desolate earth, deserted trees, the sodden pasture lane and the departure of the birds. The poet’s Sorrow finds beauty in the Autumn days. She reprimands the poet for not being able to experience the joy in Autumn and asks for an explanation. The phrase “Simple worsted grey is silver now with clinging mist” reflects the mood of the poem, the coexistence of joy and sorrow.
Not yesterday I learned to know The love of bare November days Before the coming of the snow, But it were vain to tell her so, And they are better for her praise
In the first three stanzas the poet is forced to listen to his ‘guest’ extol the virtues of Autumn, ‘the dark days of autumn rain’ and she seems convinced that he has ‘no eye for’ the beauty that surrounds him at this time of year. Those of us familiar with the poetry of Frost know this to be false and we know that he does appreciate these beauties. However, the constant repetition of ‘She’ creates a sense of easy familiarity with his guest, ‘She walks’, ‘She talks’, ‘She thinks, ‘She’s glad’ and, therefore, out of respect or deference, he doesn’t make any effort to correct his companion, for ‘they are better for her praise’. In actual fact, it was not just yesterday that he discovered this fact, he has known it for many a long day:
Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
The poem is lucid, characterized by a tone which is musical – is written in iambic tetrameter. The poem expresses the poet’s love for November days in an extremely original way. The poet seems to happily embrace the November Guest (Sorrow) and seems to enjoy her company. The pictorial imagery in the poem is easy, vivid, simple, and rich.
The intriguing question here is, of course, who, if anyone, is being referred to when he speaks of ‘My Sorrow’? Maybe ‘Sorrow’ represents someone close to him, his wife perhaps, who despite her closeness to him fails to recognise that he too finds November beautiful. In a famous letter written by Frost in 1939 to his daughter, Lesley, he refers to a letter written by his wife Elinor to their children:
“My, my, what sorrow runs through all she wrote to you children. No wonder something of it overcasts my poetry if read aright. No matter how humorous I am, I am sad. I am a jester about sorrow. She coloured my thinking from the first just as at the last she troubled my politics. It was no loss but a gain of course. She was not as original as me in thought but she dominated my art with the power of her character and nature” (Latham : 397-8).
If we are to assume – and this is dangerous ground – that the speaker is Frost himself then we can sieve through biographical details for clues as to the identity of this Sorrow. Any such survey, however, will show that Frost’s personal life was plagued by grief and sorrow and loss. By the time this poem was published in 1913 Frost had buried two of his children: his son Elliot died of cholera in 1900 aged four and his daughter Elinor Bettina died just three days after her birth in 1907. His mother who had cancer had also passed away – co-incidentally in November 1900! Maybe it is one of these losses that caused Frost such sorrow?
However, Frost’s life, even after the publication of A Boy’s Will in 1913, continued to be plagued with sorrow and heartache. In 1920, he had to commit his younger sister Jeanie to a mental hospital, where she died nine years later. Mental illness apparently ran in Frost’s family, as both he and his mother suffered from depression, and his daughter Irma was committed to a mental hospital in 1947. Frost’s wife, Elinor, also experienced bouts of depression. She also suffered from heart problems throughout her life. She developed breast cancer in 1937 and eventually died of heart failure in 1938. His son Carol, born in 1902, committed suicide in 1940.
In my view, it is highly unlikely that any of these tragic biographical events formed the basis for this poem – although the loss of his mother in November 1900 may indeed have been a catalyst. While this literary detective work may have some foundation, I am more inclined to believe that the ‘Sorrow’ in question here may be simply a melancholic mood that comes over the poet during the long month of November, a sense of resignation that Winter is at last upon him. He tells us that Sorrow’s visit is only a temporary visitation and that it is hugely influenced by the bleakness of nature and the greyness of the weather. However, the poet owns this blue mood that comes over him during November. He says it’s ‘My Sorrow’ and it has come to visit annually during November. Indeed, November and Thanksgiving are synonymous and Frost sees the bright side here: Sorrow teaches him how to appreciate Nature at this time of the year and he is a willing student.
The poem is living proof of that old saying, ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ and that at this time of year these ‘dark days’ hold their own beauty: ‘the withered tree’, ‘the sodden pasture’, ‘the clinging mist’ evoke a powerful and distinctive feeling or emotional memory in the poet. Even his ‘Guest’ chides him that he cannot see that even in November every cloud has a silver lining!
Frost’s world, the world we perceive in his poetry, is largely a rural world, a world of nature and trees, and soil, and pasture. His poetry, like that of Kavanagh, Heaney, and others, recreates a local and familiar landscape in which Frost, as a poet and as a person, is in communion. We sense that he knows nature’s spaces. We believe that his is a voice of integrity that invites us into fields and pastures and along the brooks of New England. And we occasionally feel that along the way, we may even discover something of Frost himself.
Works Cited
Latham, Edward, ed., Robert Frost: A Biography, New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1981.
Wikipedia page on Robert Frost
“My November Guest”, is taken from A Boy’s Will, the first published volume of Frost’s poetry (1913). Here it is read by the poet himself.
FURTHER READING:
For a more detailed analysis of Robert Frost’s poetry see here
For commentary on ‘Spring Pool’ by Robert Frost check here
For commentary on ‘A Tuft of Flowers’ by Robert Frost check here
Check out some reflections on Robert Frost’s ‘The Road not Taken’ here
And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,
And feel a spirit kindred to my own;
So that henceforth I worked no more alone;
But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,
And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;
And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech
With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.
‘Men work together,’ I told him from the heart,
‘Whether they work together or apart.’
Commentary:
Robert Frost is reputed to have said that ‘a poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom’. This statement is definitely true of this beautiful lyric which was written in 1913. He tells us that the poem reflected ‘my position between socialism and individualism’. Indeed, the poem ends with a wonderful epiphany which suggests that he is leaning more towards socialism!
This lovely nature lyric creates a wonderful allegory on the position of the poet and his place in the modern world which, for me, is equally as profound as Heaney’s allegory in ‘Digging’. Frost uses the mower in this poem to represent the artist, the poet, the painter, the creator of beautiful thought-provoking things. The mower has left a tuft of flowers, just as poets leave their life’s work, as a reminder to all who follow that there is beauty in the world. However, very often in Frost’s poetry humans are depicted as isolated figures in the landscape. Not only are they isolated but they represent loneliness, and thereby acquire symbolic status. Loneliness can be seen as a human condition and man’s efforts to communicate effectively are at best difficult as seen in this beautiful lyric. This is why poets and artists are still needed by us to act as our trailblazers and scouts, to go before us, to take the risks, and help us discover the hidden beauty that lies in our meadows and pastures, leaving us many ‘a message from the dawn’.
Frost describes how he sets out to ‘turn the grass’ after the mower has earlier cut the meadow with his scythe in the early morning, ‘in the dew before the sun’. He looks in vain for the mysterious mower who has disappeared and has presumably moved on to another meadow. Then unexpectedly ‘a bewildered butterfly’ stumbles on the scene. The poet has a sudden moment of epiphany when he beholds the sight of flowers that have been left untouched by the scythe:
A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared
Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.
Even though the two men are working separately the poet realises that in this tuft of flowers which have been spared by the mower is a message from the man who has gone before him. Frost realises that the mower too has a deep appreciation of nature’s beauty and has left the tuft of flowers by the brook as a reminder and as a sign of solidarity. This leads him to believe that he is no longer alone, that in some way he is linked to this enigmatic mower:
And feel a spirit kindred to my own;
So that henceforth I worked no more alone;
So, from an ordinary everyday experience Frost has moved to the appreciation for the need for fellowship in his life:
‘Men work together,’ I told him from the heart,
‘Whether they work together or apart.’
This epiphany strikes Frost like a thunderbolt as he turns the new-mown hay in the meadow but it also strikes the reader and further serves to reinforce for us the simple wonders and powers of nature. ‘A Tuft of Flowers’ highlights for us how joy can return to the poet’s soul through work and companionship with other people, often through little, unremarkable random acts of kindness. It reinforces for me how life can offer many different possibilities for choice and human companionship, and how rich and glorious the whole world of nature is.
These pools that, though in forests, still reflect
The total sky almost without defect,
And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,
Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone,
And yet not out by any brook or river,
But up by roots to bring dark foliage on.
The trees that have it in their pent-up buds
To darken nature and be summer woods –
Let them think twice before they use their powers
To blot out and drink up and sweep away
These flowery waters and these watery flowers
From snow that melted only yesterday.
Analysis:
Robert Frost was very much influenced by the Romantic and Victorian poets who had gone before him. As with the Romantic poets, Frost sees the natural scene, accurately observed, as the primary poetic subject. Nature is not described for its own sake but as a thought provoking stimulus for the poet, leading him to more insight or revelation.
Romantic nature poems, such as ‘Spring Pools’, were usually meditative poems. The landscape was sometimes personified or imbued with human life as it is in this beautiful lyric. The Romantics subscribed to Wordsworth’s belief that poets should ‘choose incidents and situations from common life’ and write about them in ‘language really spoken by men’ who belong to ‘humble and rustic life’. Frost puts many of these principles to good use in this poem.
Unlike many American poets in the twentieth century, Frost upheld formal poetic values during turbulent and changing times, when formal practices were widely abandoned. He emphasised the importance of rhyme and metrical variety, observed traditional forms and developed his technical skills. He could claim without fear of contradiction that ‘I am one of the notable craftsmen of my time’. His poetry was written so that the rhyming ‘will not seem the tiniest bit strained’. He used terza rima, end-of-line rhymes, and full and half rhyme.
This short lyric poem opens as Spring begins to take hold of the landscape. The forest pools formed by the last of the melting snows and rain still mirror the cloudy sky. The poet informs us that these pools will not last long because the roots of the mighty trees in the Vermont forest will very soon greedily soak up these pools in order to encourage leaf growth. This is a rather unusual and disturbing perspective on Nature – the poet sees an ominous, dark side to Nature. The trees soak up the Spring pools and within a short period of time, they are covered in leaves that blot out the flowers on the forest floor and the pools of water which gave them sustenance. This is symbiosis in reverse and reflects Frost’s unusual perspective on Nature.
Frost demonstrates to us here that he was a keen observer of the natural world. Plants, geographical features and the seasons have their place in his poetry: the physical world of spring pools, winter snows, the sky, brooks, Vermont mountains are all part of the rich landscape he describes for us.
However, we must realise that the natural world is rarely described for its own sake or as a background against which the action of the poem takes place. Instead, nature leads the poet to an insight or revelation. Often a comparison emerges between the natural scene and the psyche, what Frost called ‘inner and outer weather’. His descriptions of nature are not sentimental. He describes a world that is bleak, empty and cold.
The imagination enables the poet to see the world in this new way. In brief, intense moments he may enter a higher, visionary state. This allows him to regenerate his imaginative and creative capability and provides him with fresh insights and new inspiration for his poetry. This state cannot be sustained for long, however, and he must return to the real world.
The poet is being very philosophical here and looks at Nature in an unusual way. Yet he is very balanced in his thinking and this balance is reflected in the structure of the poem. Stanza One describes the coming of Spring in all its glory. We see his efforts at balance in his use of repetition in the lines,
And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,
Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone,
In Stanza Two, Spring gives way to Summer and again Frost shares with us his understanding of the delicate and finely balanced relationships within nature. He writes of nature with a keen eye and respects her beauty and her peculiar ways. The poet observes that the ‘trees have it in their pent-up buds / To darken nature and be summer woods’. He goes on to personify nature adding that the trees should ‘think twice before they use their powers / to blot out and drink up and sweep away’ the spring pools. It is a very direct poem, a poem with purpose.
The main theme of this poem is mutability and the transience of time. These are important, weighty concepts in poetry in general but especially here. This poem, ‘Spring Pools’, sees time as being destructive. For him, yesterday’s flowers wither, Winter snows melt, spring pools are drained by trees, trees lose their leaves in Autumn. The unpalatable epiphany for the poet is that Time destroys beauty.
Therefore, we see the imagery in some of Frost’s poems is deceptively simple. There are images from the natural and the human worlds. Some are everyday and ordinary, some are grotesque and macabre. In this poem the imagery carries the meaning. Frost uses precise details to re-create the colour, texture and sounds of the world within the poem. This makes his poetry richly sensuous. Yet, using the same technique, he can paint a cold, bleak scene that is chillingly realistic. So, beware: simple poems can be symbolic of ideas that are more profound!
Nevertheless, in his beloved Vermont countryside, Frost himself tends to work ‘alone’, he walks alone, and plays alone, being ‘too far from town to learn baseball’. His main concern, it would appear, is not with community but with the individual identity – of pools, of fences, of apples, and of himself. Through his poems, we imagine a man who values self-sufficiency and individualism. He chooses the road ‘less travelled’. He can be seen turning, not outward towards community but inward towards his inner self in such poems as ‘After Apple-Picking’ where he reflects that ‘I am over-tired / Of the great harvest I myself desired’. His inward quest is also balanced by his outward journey towards familiar things in nature, giving his verse a reflective and meditative quality, whether he speaks of himself or of nature.
Check out my overview of Robert Frost’s poetry here
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
‘The Road not Taken’ has always been a very popular poem and despite 21st Century developments such as Google Maps and iPhones and Sat Navs it still bears a relevance for the modern reader. Then again not all journeys are easily mapped and some take place off-road! This lyric poem, a first-person narrative tale, describes a key moment in the poet’s life. In the poem, the speaker, whom we can assume is Robert Frost himself, is faced with a choice that appears quite suddenly as he walks along a forest track. Imagine walking through beautiful woodland in upstate New York or Vermont as the Fall takes hold and imagine at this moment, the route on which you travel diverges into two separate paths. This mirrors the poet’s dilemma in the poem and he faces a difficult decision that has to be made for the moment, yet may have repercussions that last a lifetime. This is what makes the decision so difficult.
If you consider, briefly, some decisions you make in your own life, you know that you might make hundreds of choices in any one day, most without even noticing! Deciding where to go for lunch is usually not too difficult; however, a much more difficult decision is the career to follow after your Leaving Cert or A Levels. Your choice may affect your life for many years and so you tend to take time and effort in arriving at that decision.
So, Frost comes to a fork in the road. If taken on a literal level, the choice is simply the path along which to continue. However, if these paths are seen in a symbolic or allegoric way, then the choice is more challenging. Great poetry and literature have always given us many examples where life is seen in terms of a journey on which we will meet many twists and turns. So, therefore, the moment described so beautifully in the poem could be such a moment in anyone’s life.
The poet considers his options carefully. He looks down both paths, ‘as far as I could’ in an attempt to see what they might offer. But his view is limited by the bend as the track veers into the undergrowth. It is, in other words, impossible to foresee what future may lie ahead – and Frost did not seem to have the luxury of a Change-of-Mind slip! At first, each alternative is equally appealing or ‘just as fair’. Similarly, both roads diverge into ‘a yellow wood’ – Vermont in all its Autumnal glory! The first path, however, is a more popular route, while the other less-traveled path is overgrown and ‘wanted wear’. The choice is clear but not at all simple: the common, easy path or the unusual, more challenging path? The first road might prove more reliable, even reassuring, for others have gone that way. The more difficult road, however, may produce a less predictable outcome yet perhaps a more fulfilling and individual one.
The poet is aware that the minor difference between the paths at this time will become major differences as the paths diverge further into the woods and into the future. Each path is attractive and alluring in its own way, but he cannot travel both. You can’t have your cake and eat it! This he regrets. Nonetheless, he decides.
Even as he travels his chosen path he still wonders about the path he has rejected and hopes to keep ‘the first for another day’. Yet, he knows in his heart that ‘way leads on to way, / I doubted if I should ever come back’. The poem, in this way, suggests that we can only hope to explore a very limited number of life’s possibilities. Finally, the poet ‘sighs’, happy with his choice, yet wondering what if…..? What experiences might have occurred along the other path? Certainly, his choice has ‘made all the difference’. That is gratifying; the decision has had a positive effect on his life and he is thankful for that and overall seems pleased with the road he has chosen.
This poem reminds us that important decisions in life are not exact predictions. We base our choice on reflection of what might be encountered along the way. Like Frost, we all hope that our major decisions will make ‘all the difference’ in our lives. We need to believe they will.
Frost believed that each poem was a ‘little voyage of discovery’; a path to something else, rather than an end in itself. Perhaps, the road not taken is just such a voyage?
At a dinner in Amherst on the day of his eightieth birthday, Frost said: ‘all I’ve wanted to do is write a few little poems it’d be hard to get rid of’. He also commented: ‘We rise out of disorder into order and the poems that I make are little bits of order. It’s as if I made a basket or a piece of pottery or a vase or something and if you suffer any sense of confusion in life the best thing you can do is make little poems. Or cigarette smoke rings. Even those have form.’
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CAVEAT EMPTOR!
THESE NOTES ARE DESIGNED TO COMPLEMENT THE WORK ALREADY DONE IN PREPARATION FOR LEAVING CERT ENGLISH (HIGHER LEVEL). HERE YOU WILL FIND A PERSONAL REVIEW OF SOME THEMES AND ISSUES WHICH FEATURE IN THE POETRY OF ROBERT FROST. YOU SHOULD CONSIDER THESE IDEAS, THEN RE-EXAMINE THE POEMS MENTIONED FOR EVIDENCE TO SUBSTANTIATE OR CONTRADICT THESE INTERPRETATIONS. IN OTHER WORDS, MAKE YOUR OWN OF THESE NOTES, ADD TO THEM OR DELETE FROM THEM AS YOU SEE FIT.
THE FOLLOWING SELECTION IS SUGGESTED BECAUSE THEY DEAL WITH MANY OF THE MAJOR THEMES WHICH RECUR IN FROST’S POETRY:
THE TUFT OF FLOWERS (1913)
AFTER APPLE-PICKING (1914)
OUT, OUT.. (1916)
SPRING POOLS (1928)
ACQUAINTED WITH THE NIGHT (1928)
DESIGN (1936)
PROVIDE, PROVIDE (1936)
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BACKGROUND INFLUENCES
Frost studied the classics, had a thorough knowledge of the Bible, and was well-read in European and American literature. Romantic and Victorian poets played an important role in shaping his poetic theory.
ROMANTIC POETRY (1798 – 1832): Romantic poetry was written against a background of social, political, economic and religious change, not unlike the changes experienced by American society from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards. Frost was drawn towards aspects of their poetry when formulating his own distinctive poetic style.
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley, among other Romantic poets, believed that poetry should express the poet’s own mind, imagination and feelings. His emotions, thoughts and experiences should form the central subject in his work.
The lyric, written in the first person, became the preferred Romantic form. The ‘I’ is usually the poet himself, not a persona created by the poet.
The natural scene, accurately observed, is the primary poetic subject. Nature is not described for its own sake but as a thought-provoking stimulus for the poet, leading him to more insight or revelation.
Romantic nature poems are usually meditative poems. The landscape is sometimes personified or imbued with human life. There is a reaction against a purely scientific view of nature. Humans are depicted as isolated figures in the landscape.
The Romantics subscribed to Wordsworth’s belief that poets should ‘choose incidents and situations from common life’ and write about them in ‘language really spoken by men’ who belong to ‘humble and rustic life’.
Wordsworth insisted the poet should use ‘a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect’.
The poet’s visionary imagination rises above the limited, sense-bound understanding and enables him to see things in a new way.
Romantic poetry is concerned with mystery and magic, folklore and superstition. The role of the imagination is related to the importance of instinct, intuition and the emotions of the ‘heart’ as the source of poetry. (This is also very true of Yeats’ poetry.) According to Coleridge, ‘Deep thinking is attainable only by the man of deep feeling’. The capacity to imagine permits the poet to enter a higher visionary state and regenerate the world.
VICTORIAN POETRY: Frost studied Victorian poetry in great detail. He cited Thomas Hardy and Robert Browning among his favourite poets. Three features of this poetry made a particular impression on him:
The use of traditional forms, such as the sonnet
The revival of the narrative poem, prosaic in style and casually colloquial in tone
An abiding awareness of time and its effect on humans.
SOME THEMES AND ISSUES IN FROST’S POETRY
The Natural World: Frost was a keen observer of the natural world. Plants, insects, geographical features and the seasons have their place in his poetry.
Plants: butterfly weed, blue or white heal-all, yellow leaves, dark pines, apple trees, russet apples, summer forests.
The physical world: spring pools, winter snows, the sky, brooks, Vermont mountains.
The seasons: autumn and winter are the dominant seasons, with falling leaves, bare trees, snow, ice, chill winds and rain.
The natural world is rarely described for its own sake or as a background against which the action of the poem takes place. Instead, nature leads the poet to an insight or revelation. Often a comparison emerges between the natural scene and the psyche, what Frost called ‘inner and outer weather’.
His descriptions of nature are not sentimental. He describes a world that is bleak, empty and cold, where creatures suffer in silence and humans feel isolated. His natural world contains blight, darkness and death and therefore can be threatening, hostile or indifferent.
Isolation and communication: Humans are depicted as figures of isolation in the landscape. Not only are they isolated but they represent loneliness, and thereby acquire symbolic status. Loneliness can be seen as a human condition. Efforts to communicate effectively are at best difficult (‘The Tuft of Flowers’), and are sometimes rebuffed (‘Acquainted with the Night’).
The role of fate and chance: Frost is far less affirmative about the universe than other American writers. Looking at nature, they discerned a benign creator, whereas he saw ‘no expression, nothing to express it’. In Frost’s world, God is either hostile or indifferent to the plight of helpless creatures, who, like humans, are victims of fate or chance. (This theme is dealt with very well in Tennyson’s great Victorian poem ‘Choric Song of the Lotus Eaters’). His poetry records an ever-present, underlying darkness that erupts in a random manner with tragic circumstances. (see ‘Out, out –‘).
Mutability – the effect of time on people and nature: In Frost’s poetry time is sometimes seen as being destructive:
Yesterday’s flowers wither
Winter snows melt, spring pools are drained by trees, trees lose their leaves in autumn
Time destroys beauty, impoverishes the elderly.
The effect of time can be overcome to some extent by the power of memories and the imagination (‘The Tuft of Flowers’).
The role of the imagination: The imagination enables the poet to see the world in a new way. In brief, intense moments he may enter a higher, visionary state. This allows him to regenerate his imaginative and creative capability and provides him with fresh insights and new inspiration for his poetry. This state cannot be sustained for long, however, and he must return to the real world.
STYLE AND TECHNIQUE: SOME POINTS
Language: From his study of Hardy’s writing, Frost learnt how to achieve simplicity in poetry through the use of a few well-chosen words. He made a conscious effort to use ordinary language in his poems and captured the full range of human emotions, from joy to sorrow and from exaltation to fear, through the use of plain, monosyllabic speech. He stressed the importance of colloquial language, as it was appropriate to the subject matter in his verse and made his poetry accessible to a wider audience. Frost played the colloquial rhythms against the formal patterns of line and verse and constrained them within traditional forms, such as the sonnet or dramatic monologue. The plain diction, natural speech rhythms and simplicity of images contrive to make the poems seem natural and unplanned.
Frost used repetition for effect, to emphasise, and to add to the musical quality of his verse. He described sound in the poem as ‘the gold in the ore’ and added that ‘the object in writing poetry is to make all poems sound as different as possible from each other’.
Rhyme: Unlike many American poets in the twentieth century, Frost upheld formal poetic values during changing times, when formal practices were widely abandoned. He emphasised the importance of rhyme and metrical variety, observed traditional forms and developed his technical skills. He could claim without fear of contradiction that ‘I am one of the notable craftsmen of my time’. His poetry is written so that the rhyming ‘will not seem the tiniest bit strained’. He used terza rima, end-of-line rhymes, and full and half-rhyme. He also wrote in blank verse.
Frost used a wide variety of verse forms, including the sonnet, dramatic monologue, narrative and lyric.
Imagery: The imagery in Frost’s poems is deceptively simple. There are images from the natural and the human worlds. Some are everyday and ordinary, some are grotesque and macabre. In a number of poems, such as ‘Spring Pools’, the imagery caries the meaning. Frost uses precise details to re-create the colour, texture and sounds of the world within the poem. This makes his poetry richly sensuous. Yet, using the same technique, he can paint a cold, bleak scene that is chillingly realistic.
His use of similes and metaphors creates layers of meaning in his poems. In ‘After Apple Picking’, for example, the metaphor used is complex. On one level it can be read as a nature poem, while at a deeper level it can be read as a study of the creative process. (And there are other levels in between!).
Tone: The tone of voice used is vital to the meaning in Frost’s poems. His poetry displays a great range of tone, and it may vary considerably within a particular poem. It can be precise and matter-of-fact, sympathetic, sad, relieved, strong and confident, despairing, humorous, dark and ironic, wistful or weary.
First-person narrative: Frost frequently used the first-person for his narrative. The reader is permitted a glimpse into the speaker’s life at a specific moment, often during a crisis. The use of the first person creates a feeling of reliability: the reader is being given a first-hand account of an event, and trusts the accuracy of the narrator. The authenticity of the story is never doubted in ‘Out, out – ‘, for example.
Dramatic stories: A strong narrative structure is apparent in many of Frost’s poems. The narrator takes the reader through a series of events and actions, which lead to a dramatic conclusion. These events are often thought-provoking or provide an insight into life.
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SUMMARY OF PRINCIPAL FEATURES IN FROST’S POETRY
Frost wrote in various traditional forms, including the lyric and the sonnet; he is especially noted for his achievements in blank verse encompassing his narrative monologues and dialogues.
His themes include the character, people and landscape of New England; fertility and beauty of nature; relationships between individuals and nature, and between individuals themselves; selfhood, love.
Style: He writes in the New England dialect; his forms are not experimental but are adapted to the poet’s purpose. Visual images and aural images are significant features of his style.
For Frost, ‘the sound of sense’ has an important bearing on meaning; the sound and tone of words, therefore, are significant.
Even in so-called nature poems, the person is often to the fore. His focus is nearly always on the individual rather than the community.
Colloquial and dramatic idiom is preferred to poetic diction.
Simple poems can be symbolic of ideas that are more profound. (Therefore, tread carefully!)
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AN OVERVIEW OF THE POETRY OF
ROBERT FROST
Frost once said that ‘the four things I most wanted to go into in life were archaeology, astronomy, farming and teaching Latin’, but as we now know he also ‘went in’ for poetry. ‘I want to reach out to all sorts and kinds’ he said and it would seem that, in his poetry, he succeeded. As a young man, he was advised by the Reverend William E. Wolcott to write a more heightened, elevated kind of poem. Wolcott thought that Frost’s poetry was too much like the speaking voice but, in fact, this speaking voice, ordinary speech, poetry that talked, was what Frost preferred. Years later, Frost was to see that advice as pivotal in his development as a poet,
‘I’m sure the old gentleman didn’t have the slightest idea he was having any effect on a very stubborn youngster who thought he knew what he knew. But something he said actually changed the whole course of my writing. It all became purposeful’.
In a letter written in 1914, Frost wrote that ‘Words exist in the mouth not books’ and whenever Frost gave a poetry reading, he used the word ‘say’ rather than ‘read’. At one such reading in the grand ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, he told his audience: ‘I have a feeling you didn’t understand that poem. I’ll say it again.’
Frost was always interested in the rhythms of natural speech and he was also very interested in formal patterning and rhyme. Free verse (unrhymed, irregular verse) was rejected by Frost. He said that writing free verse was like playing tennis without a net! In other words, he enjoyed the discipline and restrictions of the net – for example, ‘The Tuft of Flowers’ is written in heroic couplets and he also wrote blank verse and liked the sonnet form (‘Design’).
He chose to write in a language that was close to and inspired by ordinary, everyday speech. But it was not only the language that made him a popular and accessible poet; it was also his subject matter. Frost’s poems are rooted in the natural world but he himself was careful to point out that in his poetry man is almost always part of the landscape. He made New England his own and wrote about ordinary people living ordinary lives. The subject matter of the poems – turning the hay, spring pools, picking apples, a farmyard accident, a spider, walking at night – is described, but the poems go beyond description. (This characteristic of his poetry is probably what attracted Heaney to the poetry of Frost.). In ‘The Road Not Taken’ and many other poems the speaker explores moral and philosophical ideas, so that suggestion is as important as what is being described. Frost said that ‘You don’t want to say directly what you can say indirectly.’ (After all, the reader has to go some part of the journey too!).
The world of Frost’s poetry is beautiful but it is also harsh and uncaring. Frost wrote that ‘Man has need of nature, but nature has no need of man.’ At a dinner in Frost’s honour in New York on the poet’s eighty-fifth birthday (26th March 1959), Lionel Trilling said Frost’s best poems represented ‘the terrible actualities of life’ and. In an essay published in Partisan Review, Summer 1959, Trilling described the world of Frost’s poetry as a ‘terrifying universe’ and one of loneliness, doubts, disappointment and despair and his biography also reveals that his life was a troubled, anxious, sorrowful one.
However, there is not much evidence of this dark side in the poems on our course – especially in the ones highlighted. Instead, for the most part, the voice we hear when we read Frost is a warm, inviting, gentle voice. Lines such as ‘I went to turn the grass once’, ‘I am done with apple-picking now’, ‘I shall be telling this with a sigh’, ‘I have outwalked the furthest city light’ are immediate, even colloquial, in tone. In 1939 Frost wrote:
‘No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. For me, the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew …. A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it. Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.’
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At a dinner in Amherst on the day of his eightieth birthday, Frost said: ‘all I’ve wanted to do is write a few little poems it’d be hard to get rid of’. He also commented:
‘We rise out of disorder into order and the poems that I make are little bits of order. It’s as if I made a basket or a piece of pottery or a vase or something and if you suffer any sense of confusion in life the best thing you can do is make little poems. Or cigarette smoke rings. Even those have form.’
At the beginning of many volumes of his poems, and also at the beginning of his Collected Poems, is a poem called ‘The Pasture’. It serves as both introduction and invitation. Frost is going out to attend to everyday jobs on the farm but he invites us to look at the world through his eyes, the eye of a poet:
THE PASTURE
I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I shan’t be long – You come too.
I’m going out to fetch the little calf
That’s standing by the mother. It’s so young
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I shan’t be long – You come too.
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SAMPLE ANSWER
“Frost’s poems are ‘little voyages of discovery’.” Discuss.
Frost’s world is a rural world, a world of nature and trees, soil and crops. His poetry, like that of Kavanagh, Heaney and others, recreates a local and familiar landscape in which Frost, as a poet and as a person, is in communion. We sense that he knows nature’s spaces. We believe that his is a voice of integrity that invites us into fields and orchards and along the brooks of New England. And we occasionally feel that along the way, we may even discover something of Frost himself.
Frost often shares with us his understanding of the delicate and finely balanced relationships within nature. He writes of nature with a keen eye and respects her beauty and her peculiar ways. In ‘Spring Pools’, for example, there are many evocative images of trees, pools and flowers. The poet observes that the ‘trees have it in their pent-up buds / To darken nature and be summer woods’. He goes on to personify nature adding that the trees should ‘think twice before they use their powers / to blot out and drink up and sweep away’ the spring pools. It is a very direct poem, a poem with purpose.
Purpose is also central to ‘The Tuft of Flowers’. We see the speaker searching through ‘an isle of trees’ before stumbling across ‘A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared’. The speaker discovers that, when he acknowledges nature’s presence on the farm, he no longer works alone. In the poem, nature’s ways seem, at first, quite different from man’s. Man appears initially as a destructive force, with a ‘blade so keen’ that ‘levelled’ the scene. The butterfly, returning to alight on the flower of yesterday, now discovers that it ‘lay withering on the ground’. However, nature is resourceful and the butterfly immediately discovers an alternative flower beside ‘a reedy brook’. Ironically, it has been uncovered by the ‘scythe’. The butterfly’s simple, though significant discovery is interesting; it suggests the connections, the interdependence within nature, between butterfly and flower or, as in ‘Spring Pools’, between tree and water. It also suggests the continuity of life, its habitual capacity to survive and regenerate. At the end of the poem, the speaker and the butterfly are seen in harmony, a link established between them. Frost has found meaning in nature and understanding in man, ‘Whether they work together or apart’.
Frost, however, also makes somewhat darker discoveries in nature. At times, these discoveries might be applied to the human space. In ‘Design’, for example, the macabre picture of the ‘fat and white’ spider on the ‘white’ heal-all, carrying a ‘moth / Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth’ shows the exactness with which Frost can depict nature’s creatures. From this deadly, pale procession, the poet reflects that the driving force behind the scene of such cruelty is the ‘design of darkness’. Who is to say that such is not the case in human society and in human community?
Interestingly, though, there is a conspicuous absence of community in his work. Even where the poet comes into the arena of human society, in a poem such as ‘Acquainted with the Night’, there is no sense of contact, of community between people who live along the ‘saddest city’ lanes. It is a place where people drop their ‘eyes’, unwilling to engage, abandoning themselves to insular and isolated lives. The Frost who walks through country paths in ‘The Road Not Taken’ seems much more at ease than the Frost who ‘stood still’ in the city rain.
Nevertheless, in the countryside, Frost himself tends to work ‘alone’, he walks alone, and plays alone, being ‘too far from town to learn baseball’. His main concern, it would appear, is not with community but with the individual identity – of pools, of apples, and of himself. Through his poems, we imagine a man who values self-sufficiency and individualism. He chooses the road ‘less travelled’. He can be seen turning, not outward towards community but inward towards his inner self in ‘After Apple-Picking’ where he reflects that ‘I am over-tired / Of the great harvest I myself desired’. His inward quest is also balanced by his outward journey towards familiar things in nature, giving his verse a reflective and meditative quality, whether he speaks of himself or of nature.
We can, therefore, make little voyages of discovery through Frost’s verse. The poet reveals his interesting and personal insights into nature while he also appears to us, the readers, as sensitive, tender, at times humorous, but especially reflective man. He can be detached from his subject or quite sympathetic to it. In all, we have discovered a poet who is emotionally honest to us, to nature and to himself.
Some personal thoughts on ‘The Road not Taken’
‘The Road not Taken’ has always been a very popular poem. It is a lyric, a first-person narrative tale of a key moment in the poet’s life. In the poem, the speaker, whom we can assume is Frost, is faced with a choice that appears quite suddenly as he walks along a forest track. At this moment, the route on which he has travelled diverges into two separate paths. The speaker faces a difficult decision that has to be made for the moment, yet may have repercussions that last a lifetime. This is what makes the decision so difficult.
If you consider, briefly, some decisions you make in your own life, you know that you might make hundreds of choices in any one day, most without even noticing! Deciding where to go for lunch is usually not too difficult; however, a much more difficult decision is the career to follow after your Leaving Cert. Your choice may affect your life for many years and so you tend to take time and effort in arriving at that decision.
So, Frost comes to a fork in the road. If taken on a literal level, the choice is simply the path along which to continue. However, if these paths are seen in a symbolic way, then the choice is more challenging. Our poetry course has thrown up many examples of where life is seen in terms of a journey on which we will meet many twists and turns. The moment in the poem could be such a moment in anyone’s life.
The poet considers his options carefully. He looks down both paths, ‘as far as I could’ in an attempt to see what they might offer. But his view is limited by the bend as the track veers into the undergrowth. It is, in other words, impossible to foresee what future may lie ahead – and Frost did not seem to have the luxury of a Change-of-Mind slip! At first, each alternative is equally appealing or ‘just as fair’. Similarly, both roads diverge into ‘a yellow wood’. The first path, however, is a more popular route, while the other less-travelled path is overgrown and ‘wanted wear’. The choice is clear but not at all simple: the common, easy path or the unusual, more challenging path? The first road might prove more reliable, even reassuring, for others have gone that way. The more difficult road, however, may produce a less predictable outcome yet perhaps a more fulfilling and individual one.
The poet is aware that the minor difference between the paths at this time will become major differences as the paths diverge further into the woods and into the future. Each path is attractive and alluring in its own way, but he cannot travel both. You can’t have your cake and eat it! This he regrets. Nonetheless, he decides.
Even as he travels his chosen path he still wonders about the path he has rejected and hopes to keep ‘the first for another day’. Yet, he knows in his heart that ‘way leads on to way, /I doubted if I should ever come back’. The poem, in this way, suggests that we can only hope to explore a very limited number of life’s possibilities. Finally, the poet ‘sighs’, happy with his choice, yet wondering what if…..? What experiences might have occurred along the other path? Certainly, his choice has ‘made all the difference’. That is gratifying; the decision has had a positive effect on his life and he is thankful for that and overall seems pleased with the road he has chosen.
This poem reminds us that important decisions in life are not exact predictions. We base our choice on reflection of what might be encountered along the way. Like Frost, we all hope that our major decisions will make ‘all the difference’ in our lives. We need to believe they will.
Frost believed that each poem was a ‘little voyage of discovery’; a path to something else, rather than an end in itself. Perhaps, the road not taken is just such a voyage?
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